William McPherson, Book Critic and Novelist, Dies at 84

William McPherson, a novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for The Washington Post who won late-life acclaim for a rueful essay describing his descent into poverty, died on Tuesday in Washington. He was 84.

The cause was complications of congestive heart failure and pneumonia, his daughter, Jane McPherson, said.

Mr. McPherson had been working as a senior editor at William Morrow in New York when Benjamin C. Bradlee, the editor of The Post, lured him to the newspaper in 1969 and placed him in charge of its Sunday book supplement, then called Book Week.

When Book Week, jointly produced by The Post and The Chicago Tribune, ceased publication in 1972, Mr. McPherson became the first editor of its successor, Book World, produced solely by The Post.

Under his editorship, Book World took its place as one of the leading literary publications in the United States, and his wide-ranging, elegantly written reviews played no small part in establishing its reputation. In 1977, awarding him the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, the prize judges noted his “broad literary and historic perspective.”

In late middle age, Mr. McPherson unexpectedly delivered a novel, “Testing the Current,” a coming-of-age tale about an 8-year-old boy living in a small Midwestern town in the late 1930s. More than five years in the writing, it was published in 1984 to the kind of critical superlatives to which Mr. McPherson, as an editor, might have applied the blue pencil.

The novelist Russell Banks, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it “an extraordinarily intelligent, powerful and, I believe, permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory.” He added, “From the first sentence of ‘Testing the Current’ to the last, there is not one false note, one forced image. It is a novel written with great skill, and with love. It’s what most good first novels merely aspire to be.”

After writing a sequel, “To the Sargasso Sea,” published in 1987, Mr. McPherson embarked on a new journalistic adventure. On something like a whim, he headed to Romania after the fall of its dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and stayed for nearly seven years, filing reports for Granta, The Wilson Quarterly and other publications.

He pulled a last rabbit from his hat after he had returned to Washington and settled into a quiet life of occasional journalism, declining health and dwindling finances. In 2014 he chronicled his predicament, precisely and eloquently, in The Hedgehog Review.

His essay, “Falling,” described the downward spiral of a genteel man of letters who, through a combination of bad luck, bad investments and unrealistic expectations, now knew what it felt like to sit on a bench with a quarter in his pocket and no bank account.

The essay struck a nerve with readers and attracted widespread critical attention. What made it so “somber and revelatory,” James Wolcott wrote in his Vanity Fair culture blog, “is that the author is giving us the park bench perspective of what it means to be old and poor now, with no hope of reversing the downward trajectory.”

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The cover of the novel “Testing the Current.”CreditSimon and Schuster

“And,” he continued, “more importantly, what it feels like. And what it feels like is a daily scalding of shame, humiliation and being disregarded as a nobody.”

William Alexander McPherson was born on March 16, 1933, in Sault Sainte Marie, Mich., where his father, Harold, was the manager of the Union Carbide plant. His mother, the former Ruth Brubaker, was a homemaker.

He attended public schools and enrolled in the University of Michigan in 1951. After four years of study with no degree in sight, he was encouraged by school officials to try his luck elsewhere. He spent two years at Michigan State University, without earning a degree, and served a short stint as a merchant seaman before deciding, after a short visit, that Washington seemed like a nice place to live.

In 1958 he found work as a copy boy at The Post, which quickly made him a staff writer for the women’s page. In 1963 he was appointed travel editor. He later took a last, desultory stab at higher education, studying at George Washington University for two years, again leaving without a degree. He left The Post to become a senior editor at William Morrow in 1966.

In 1958 he married Elizabeth Mosher. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, Mr. McPherson is survived by two grandchildren.

In a 1987 interview with Publishers Weekly, Mr. McPherson said he had had no intention of writing a novel, or, as he put it, to “add another tree to the pulp mill.” But while he was walking to work one day in 1977, he said, a mental picture appeared unbidden: A woman on a golf course on a summer morning, taking a practice swing.

“The scene hit me with such force that I sat down on the curb,” Mr. McPherson told Washington Independent Review of Books in 2013. “It was so vivid; I saw it with such clarity and intensity that I couldn’t get it out of my head. At home in my office that night I decided I should describe what I had seen.”

In a rush, he produced 12 single-spaced pages. And over the next five and a half years, the novel took shape, with the first paragraph intact.

It began: “That summer morning, in the distance, Daisy Meyer bent her blond head over her club, a short iron for the short sixth hole, in effortless concentration on her practice swing. Still engrossed in her projected shot, and seemingly oblivious to the murmurings of the women on the porch, she walked over to the ball, addressed it, and crisply shot it off.”

The novel, told through the intensely observant eyes of its young hero, Tommy MacAllister, blended crystalline description with the confused musings of a preadolescent mind struggling to make sense of events. In 2013, it was reissued, to much fanfare, by New York Review Books Classics.

In “To the Sargasso Sea,” Tommy made a return appearance, this time as a 40-year-old playwright navigating a series of midlife crises. Mr. McPherson planned a third installment but never completed it.

One of the rare negative reviews of “Testing the Current” — perhaps the only one — appeared in Book World, of all places, written by the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies.

“Actually I don’t think he’d read the book,” Mr. McPherson told The Chicago Tribune in 2013. “He said it was a novel about a kid who loves golf, and that’s not quite what it’s about.”

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